Sigurd D''Hondt
Biographic Data
| ID | 737252 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sigurd D''Hondt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sigurd |
| FAMILY NAME | D''Hondt |
| SIGNATURE | HONDT S D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Jyväskylä |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2456-9229 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Commentary on Jonathan Bernaerts’ ‘Translation in a Minority Language’– A Sociolinguistic Perspective on Assessing Compliance with the FCNM
Trajectories of spirituality: Producing and assessing cultural evidence at the International Criminal Court
In this article, we examine the production and assessment of evidence about spirit beliefs in the international criminal trial of Ugandan rebel commander Dominic Ongwen, submitted by the defense to show that their client committed the crimes he is accused of under duress. This duress defense was ultimately rejected by the ICC Judges, based on a binary understanding of 'believing' that depicts Ongwen and other LRA commanders as impostors. However,…
Analyzing equivalences in discourse: Are discourse theory and membership categorization analysis compatible
Facing a crucial leap from political philosophy to empirical analysis, the approach to discourse analysis that arose in the aftermath of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), and that is currently known as the Essex school of discourse theory (DT), has in recent years repeatedly been accused of suffering from a methodological deficit. This paper examines to what extent membership categorization analysis (MCA), a branch of ethnomethodology that investigates l…
Engaging with the field while studying language in the legal process: Windows of engagement and normative moorings
Habiller l’espace rituel de la salle d’audience. Catégorisations scéniques dans les audiences pénales de première instance en Belgique
Cet article introduit la notion de catégorisation scénique pour référer aux tentatives des acteurs du procès d’influencer la négociation des réalités juridiques en invoquant des identités catégorielles attirant l’attention sur le cadre dans lequel ces négociations ont lieu. En s’appuyant sur un travail de terrain ethnographique dans des tribunaux pénaux de première instance belges, deux types récurrents de telles catégorisations scéniques sont id…
The Indeterminacy of Precedent: Negotiating the Admissibility of Victim Participant Testimony before the International Criminal Court
The icc represents a legal laboratory that is still consolidating itself, with multiple unclarities in evidence and procedural law requiring resolution through jurisprudence. Our paper draws on interaction analysis to unpack this process, focusing on the jurisprudential construction of ‘dual status’ victim participant testimony. To elucidate how this evidentiary/procedural element is locally negotiated, we examine an excerpt from the Ongwen heari…
Weaving the threads of international criminal justice: The double dialogicity of law and politics in the ICC al-Mahdi case
In this paper, we examine the international criminal trial of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a Malian Islamist who appeared before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, charged with the destruction of Islamic shrines during the 2012 jihadist occupation of Timbuktu. Our objective is to analyze the al-Mahdi case as a dialogical network (the destructions occurred in the context of an asynchronous, translocal, press-mediated exchange between …
One confession, multiple chronotopes: The interdiscursive authentication of an apology in an international criminal trial
This paper presents an interdiscursive analysis of a public apology made before the International Criminal Court (ICC) by a Malian Islamist accused of the destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu. It analyzes (a) how the defendant's apology metapragmatically inserts itself into a multiplicity of chronotopes and (b) how the two defense counsels subsequently reformulate that apology as part of a 'confessional chronotope', thereby decoupling it …
Why being there mattered: Staged transparency at the International Criminal Court
Confronting blackface: Stancetaking in the Dutch Black Pete debate
Recently, the Netherlands witnessed an agitated discussion over Black Pete, a blackface character associated with the Saint Nicholas festival. This paper analyzes a televised panel interview discussing a possible court ban of public Nicholas festivities, and demonstrates that participants not only disagree over the racist nature of the blackface character but also over the terms of the debate itself. Drawing on recent sociolinguistic work on stan…
Humanity and Its Beneficiaries: Footing and Stance-Taking in an International Criminal Trial
This article elucidates the role of metapragmatic devices like footing and stance-taking in trial hearings before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It focuses on the case of Ahmad al Faqi al Mahdi, a Malian Islamist found guilty of the 2012 destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu. We examine how the prosecution and defense reflexively formulate the hearing as part of a wider text trajectory and how they align personae acro…
Defending through disaffiliation: The vicissitudes of alignment and footing in Belgian criminal hearings
Quoting from the case file: How intertextual practices shape discourse at various stages in the legal trajectory
Recruiting a nonlocal language for performing local identity: Indexical appropriations of Lingala in the Congolese border town Goma
This article describes discursive processes by which inhabitants of the Congolese border town Goma attribute new indexical values to Lingala, a language exogenous to the area of which most Goma inhabitants only possess limited knowledge. This creative reconfiguration of indexicalities results in the emergence of three “indexicalities of the second order”: the indexing of (i) being a true Congolese, (ii) toughness (based on Lingala's association w…
Chapter 12 Referring to Islam in Mutual Teasing: Notes on an Encounter between Two Tanzanian Revivalists
Ah-prefacing in Kiswahili second pair parts
This article presents a conversation-analytic account of the various usages of the Kiswahili particleahas it is routinely employed in naturally occurring Kiswahili conversation. Adopting a strategy reminiscent of the one Heritage and others adopted for Englishoh, it is argued that the seemingly disparate uses of this "language-specific object" represent various context-specific particularizations of a single semantic core. The basic claim is that…
The Cultural Defense as Courtroom Drama: The Enactment of Identity, Sameness, and Difference in Criminal Trial Discourse
This article traces cultural defense as a discursive realization‐in‐context, rather than as a legal‐doctrinal figure, in a Belgian real‐life criminal trial. In examining the defense plea for a Turkish man accused of battery, three discursive techniques are identified for making Cultural Otherness visible: de‐individualization, reporting preparatory meetings with the client, and supplying ethnographic “expert” knowledge that transforms the client …
The pragmatics of interaction
Good Cops, Bad Cops: Intertextuality, Agency, and Structure in Criminal Trial Discourse
This article investigates how the institutionality of interaction is discursively accounted for in a judicial setting, a Belgian first-instance criminal case in which four defendants are accused of verbal assault on a police officer and resisting arrest. The article traces how the prosecutor and the defense attorney successively describe the incident that led to the defendants' arrest, and how they thereby demonstrate/invalidate the applicability…
Calling the stops in a Dar-es-Salaam minibus: Embodied understandings of place in a drop-off routine
Others on trial: The construction of cultural otherness in Belgian first instance criminal hearings
The Cultural Defense as Courtroom Drama: The Enactment of Identity, Sameness, and Difference in Criminal Trial Discourse
This article traces cultural defense as a discursive realization‐in‐context, rather than as a legal‐doctrinal figure, in a Belgian real‐life criminal trial. In examining the defense plea for a Turkish man accused of battery, three discursive techniques are identified for making Cultural Otherness visible: de‐individualization, reporting preparatory meetings with the client, and supplying ethnographic “expert” knowledge that transforms the client …
Others on trial: The construction of cultural otherness in Belgian first instance criminal hearings
Good Cops, Bad Cops: Intertextuality, Agency, and Structure in Criminal Trial Discourse
This article investigates how the institutionality of interaction is discursively accounted for in a judicial setting, a Belgian first-instance criminal case in which four defendants are accused of verbal assault on a police officer and resisting arrest. The article traces how the prosecutor and the defense attorney successively describe the incident that led to the defendants' arrest, and how they thereby demonstrate/invalidate the applicability…
Calling the stops in a Dar-es-Salaam minibus: Embodied understandings of place in a drop-off routine
Why being there mattered: Staged transparency at the International Criminal Court
Defending through disaffiliation: The vicissitudes of alignment and footing in Belgian criminal hearings
Recruiting a nonlocal language for performing local identity: Indexical appropriations of Lingala in the Congolese border town Goma
This article describes discursive processes by which inhabitants of the Congolese border town Goma attribute new indexical values to Lingala, a language exogenous to the area of which most Goma inhabitants only possess limited knowledge. This creative reconfiguration of indexicalities results in the emergence of three “indexicalities of the second order”: the indexing of (i) being a true Congolese, (ii) toughness (based on Lingala's association w…
Humanity and Its Beneficiaries: Footing and Stance-Taking in an International Criminal Trial
This article elucidates the role of metapragmatic devices like footing and stance-taking in trial hearings before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It focuses on the case of Ahmad al Faqi al Mahdi, a Malian Islamist found guilty of the 2012 destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu. We examine how the prosecution and defense reflexively formulate the hearing as part of a wider text trajectory and how they align personae acro…
Quoting from the case file: How intertextual practices shape discourse at various stages in the legal trajectory
The Indeterminacy of Precedent: Negotiating the Admissibility of Victim Participant Testimony before the International Criminal Court
The icc represents a legal laboratory that is still consolidating itself, with multiple unclarities in evidence and procedural law requiring resolution through jurisprudence. Our paper draws on interaction analysis to unpack this process, focusing on the jurisprudential construction of ‘dual status’ victim participant testimony. To elucidate how this evidentiary/procedural element is locally negotiated, we examine an excerpt from the Ongwen heari…
One confession, multiple chronotopes: The interdiscursive authentication of an apology in an international criminal trial
This paper presents an interdiscursive analysis of a public apology made before the International Criminal Court (ICC) by a Malian Islamist accused of the destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu. It analyzes (a) how the defendant's apology metapragmatically inserts itself into a multiplicity of chronotopes and (b) how the two defense counsels subsequently reformulate that apology as part of a 'confessional chronotope', thereby decoupling it …
Trajectories of spirituality: Producing and assessing cultural evidence at the International Criminal Court
In this article, we examine the production and assessment of evidence about spirit beliefs in the international criminal trial of Ugandan rebel commander Dominic Ongwen, submitted by the defense to show that their client committed the crimes he is accused of under duress. This duress defense was ultimately rejected by the ICC Judges, based on a binary understanding of 'believing' that depicts Ongwen and other LRA commanders as impostors. However,…
Engaging with the field while studying language in the legal process: Windows of engagement and normative moorings
Weaving the threads of international criminal justice: The double dialogicity of law and politics in the ICC al-Mahdi case
In this paper, we examine the international criminal trial of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a Malian Islamist who appeared before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, charged with the destruction of Islamic shrines during the 2012 jihadist occupation of Timbuktu. Our objective is to analyze the al-Mahdi case as a dialogical network (the destructions occurred in the context of an asynchronous, translocal, press-mediated exchange between …
Ah-prefacing in Kiswahili second pair parts
This article presents a conversation-analytic account of the various usages of the Kiswahili particleahas it is routinely employed in naturally occurring Kiswahili conversation. Adopting a strategy reminiscent of the one Heritage and others adopted for Englishoh, it is argued that the seemingly disparate uses of this "language-specific object" represent various context-specific particularizations of a single semantic core. The basic claim is that…
The pragmatics of interaction
Good Cops, Bad Cops: Intertextuality, Agency, and Structure in Criminal Trial Discourse
This article investigates how the institutionality of interaction is discursively accounted for in a judicial setting, a Belgian first-instance criminal case in which four defendants are accused of verbal assault on a police officer and resisting arrest. The article traces how the prosecutor and the defense attorney successively describe the incident that led to the defendants' arrest, and how they thereby demonstrate/invalidate the applicability…
Calling the stops in a Dar-es-Salaam minibus: Embodied understandings of place in a drop-off routine
Others on trial: The construction of cultural otherness in Belgian first instance criminal hearings
The Cultural Defense as Courtroom Drama: The Enactment of Identity, Sameness, and Difference in Criminal Trial Discourse
This article traces cultural defense as a discursive realization‐in‐context, rather than as a legal‐doctrinal figure, in a Belgian real‐life criminal trial. In examining the defense plea for a Turkish man accused of battery, three discursive techniques are identified for making Cultural Otherness visible: de‐individualization, reporting preparatory meetings with the client, and supplying ethnographic “expert” knowledge that transforms the client …
Ah-prefacing in Kiswahili second pair parts
This article presents a conversation-analytic account of the various usages of the Kiswahili particleahas it is routinely employed in naturally occurring Kiswahili conversation. Adopting a strategy reminiscent of the one Heritage and others adopted for Englishoh, it is argued that the seemingly disparate uses of this "language-specific object" represent various context-specific particularizations of a single semantic core. The basic claim is that…
Chapter 12 Referring to Islam in Mutual Teasing: Notes on an Encounter between Two Tanzanian Revivalists
Recruiting a nonlocal language for performing local identity: Indexical appropriations of Lingala in the Congolese border town Goma
This article describes discursive processes by which inhabitants of the Congolese border town Goma attribute new indexical values to Lingala, a language exogenous to the area of which most Goma inhabitants only possess limited knowledge. This creative reconfiguration of indexicalities results in the emergence of three “indexicalities of the second order”: the indexing of (i) being a true Congolese, (ii) toughness (based on Lingala's association w…
Defending through disaffiliation: The vicissitudes of alignment and footing in Belgian criminal hearings
Quoting from the case file: How intertextual practices shape discourse at various stages in the legal trajectory
Humanity and Its Beneficiaries: Footing and Stance-Taking in an International Criminal Trial
This article elucidates the role of metapragmatic devices like footing and stance-taking in trial hearings before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It focuses on the case of Ahmad al Faqi al Mahdi, a Malian Islamist found guilty of the 2012 destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu. We examine how the prosecution and defense reflexively formulate the hearing as part of a wider text trajectory and how they align personae acro…
Confronting blackface: Stancetaking in the Dutch Black Pete debate
Recently, the Netherlands witnessed an agitated discussion over Black Pete, a blackface character associated with the Saint Nicholas festival. This paper analyzes a televised panel interview discussing a possible court ban of public Nicholas festivities, and demonstrates that participants not only disagree over the racist nature of the blackface character but also over the terms of the debate itself. Drawing on recent sociolinguistic work on stan…
Habiller l’espace rituel de la salle d’audience. Catégorisations scéniques dans les audiences pénales de première instance en Belgique
Cet article introduit la notion de catégorisation scénique pour référer aux tentatives des acteurs du procès d’influencer la négociation des réalités juridiques en invoquant des identités catégorielles attirant l’attention sur le cadre dans lequel ces négociations ont lieu. En s’appuyant sur un travail de terrain ethnographique dans des tribunaux pénaux de première instance belges, deux types récurrents de telles catégorisations scéniques sont id…
The Indeterminacy of Precedent: Negotiating the Admissibility of Victim Participant Testimony before the International Criminal Court
The icc represents a legal laboratory that is still consolidating itself, with multiple unclarities in evidence and procedural law requiring resolution through jurisprudence. Our paper draws on interaction analysis to unpack this process, focusing on the jurisprudential construction of ‘dual status’ victim participant testimony. To elucidate how this evidentiary/procedural element is locally negotiated, we examine an excerpt from the Ongwen heari…
Weaving the threads of international criminal justice: The double dialogicity of law and politics in the ICC al-Mahdi case
In this paper, we examine the international criminal trial of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a Malian Islamist who appeared before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, charged with the destruction of Islamic shrines during the 2012 jihadist occupation of Timbuktu. Our objective is to analyze the al-Mahdi case as a dialogical network (the destructions occurred in the context of an asynchronous, translocal, press-mediated exchange between …
One confession, multiple chronotopes: The interdiscursive authentication of an apology in an international criminal trial
This paper presents an interdiscursive analysis of a public apology made before the International Criminal Court (ICC) by a Malian Islamist accused of the destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu. It analyzes (a) how the defendant's apology metapragmatically inserts itself into a multiplicity of chronotopes and (b) how the two defense counsels subsequently reformulate that apology as part of a 'confessional chronotope', thereby decoupling it …
Why being there mattered: Staged transparency at the International Criminal Court
Analyzing equivalences in discourse: Are discourse theory and membership categorization analysis compatible
Facing a crucial leap from political philosophy to empirical analysis, the approach to discourse analysis that arose in the aftermath of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), and that is currently known as the Essex school of discourse theory (DT), has in recent years repeatedly been accused of suffering from a methodological deficit. This paper examines to what extent membership categorization analysis (MCA), a branch of ethnomethodology that investigates l…
Engaging with the field while studying language in the legal process: Windows of engagement and normative moorings
Commentary on Jonathan Bernaerts’ ‘Translation in a Minority Language’– A Sociolinguistic Perspective on Assessing Compliance with the FCNM
Trajectories of spirituality: Producing and assessing cultural evidence at the International Criminal Court
In this article, we examine the production and assessment of evidence about spirit beliefs in the international criminal trial of Ugandan rebel commander Dominic Ongwen, submitted by the defense to show that their client committed the crimes he is accused of under duress. This duress defense was ultimately rejected by the ICC Judges, based on a binary understanding of 'believing' that depicts Ongwen and other LRA commanders as impostors. However,…
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (8 works) · Linguistics (8 works) · Criminology (7 works)